This invention relates to apparatus for producing fine particles from cutting chips such as iron chips and the like.
Metal particle molding art has made a remarkable development in various fields of industry and especially, in the field of iron machine parts in the past several years, but such an art has the disadvantages that the production cost of iron particles is relatively higher and the supply source of such particles is relatively scarce as compared with those for molten molding materials. Thus, the metal particle molding art is at present suffering from chronic shortage of iron particle supply. Of late, a novel art has been developed by which materials such as cutting chips which are easily subject to oxidation and coarse iron particles can be molded without difficulty rather than the employment of high quality iron chips. The present invention is to solve the problems relating to the cost to be incurred in the crushing of cutting chips to finer particles and shortage of supply source materials in the employment of the newly developed molding art.
Conventional crushers useful in the crushing of metal materials to finer particles are represented by stamp mills, ball mills and rod mills. However, when flat materials such as cutting chips have flat configurations and tacky materials are stacked in layers and crushed to finer particles by delivering a striking force from above, any of the conventional crushers encounters difficulty, requires a relatively long time and yields desired fine particles at a relatively low ratio. Furthermore, when cutting chips are crushed by the conventional crushers, the resulting fine particles tend to round because the particles have been subjected to the crushing force for a rather long time and such rounded fine particles have poor molding characteristics. Therefore, the fine particles produced by the conventional crushers have been scarely employed for practical purposes.